Viewing profile — soist

Most practitioners seem to understand that what they are doing is creating executable models and they don't confuse the model based on numeric observations with the actual reality.…

This is a common retort. You can read my other comments if you want to understand why you're not really addressing my points because I have already addressed how reductionism does …

Rephrase your question. I don't know what you're asking.

What value is being optimized and how do you know it is too much or not enough?

And I am saying they are confused because they are attributing personal characteristics to computers and software. By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious …

Just making sure no one is confused by common computationalist sophistry and how they attribute personal characteristics to computers and software. People can have and can create e…

I am familiar with the literature on reinforcement learning.

There is no such thing as too much optimization. Early stopping is to prevent overfitting to the training set. It's a trick just like most advances in deep learning because the und…

AlphaZero did not create any experiences. AlphaZero was software written by people to play board games and that's all it ever did.

Every software platform is essentially a digital panopticon and as AI gets deployed more widely in the real world this will also be increasingly true for non-software interactions.…

The Church-Turing thesis is a meta-mathematical statement and it neither has a proof nor disproof. In any case, this discussion has run its course.

Unknown physics is happening all the time almost by definition but as I said in another thread, good luck with your computations.

I expect claims to be backed by evidence that is consistent with our current state of knowledge. I have seen no such evidence so that's why I asked for references. In any case, thi…

Do you have a reference for this equivalency?

Well, that's essentially a logical tautology. Everything works according to the known laws of physics but it's certainly true that everything must also work with unknown laws of ph…

I think I understand. So what you're saying is that every function that can be implemented with computers must be computable. Your claim is that the brain is actually a computable …

Rule 110 can be specified with a rewrite system, also known as cellular automata: https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3248 . Cellular automatons have a correspondence with contextual gramma…

Whether something is physical or not is orthognal to whether it computes or not. You're the one who brought up physics so that's why I showed why your logic was invalid. My content…

Oh I see, so it's magic.

You'll have to define your terms first. Physicists now believe there is such a thing as dark matter and that there are objects so massive that no amount of observation can ever mak…

Just trying to figure out how rigorously people have thought about this. A computer with an undefined instruction set seems somewhat useless as a computer.

Yes. To validate the claim would require not only a formal instruction set but also the code to account for all sorts of cognitive states and processes. I'm not ruling out that som…

Steam engines and gears were used for explaining the mind as well but those turned out to be incorrect metaphors.